If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

DBs on Solaris containers pros and cons opinion

Just would like to know how many of you are running your dbs on Sun Solaris containers? Those who had decided not, what was your reason for not to choose that option? We are trying to weigh the option on our server upgrades?

zones vs containers

Oracle/Sun uses the terminology pretty interchangeably, however a zone is a Solaris virtual machine while a container is a zone with resource limitations. A plain zone has more flexibility and fewer limitations on how it shares the global machine's resources (and thereby more risk if one zone tries to grab all the resources). The first few pages of this doc explain it well: http://www.usenix.org/publications/l...penpdfs/hu.pdf

These 3 articles on my blog outline some of our issues and resulting troubleshooting around running several zones on a decently-sized Sun server, with lots of databases: http://dban00b.wordpress.com/tag/zones/

Edit: I should say, since I didn't say either way, that we really like using them and we have moved all of our 150+ databases onto zones in the last year. We use them in production, but with far fewer databases living together on a global zone than we have in non-production.

We are thinking of consolidating two production servers into one single M4000 box with two zones/containers with one being caped and other being the open range. The disk are on EQLogic iscsis. This these are for an educational institution, the open range zone/container will be daling with the registration loads while the caped one will be mostly the ETL/ODS kind of operations.

I would appreciate if you could share any of the lesson learnes or any other documentations that would help us to better tune this server.